Victoria Colored School - Victoria, Texas
Posted by: 
JimmyEv
N 28° 47.626 W 097° 00.082
14R E 695073 N 3186776
The Victoria Independent School District, formed in 1898, choose a design by Jules Leffland for the district’s second high school, one for the 'colored folks.'
Waymark Code: WM1FRQ
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 04/29/2007
Views: 18
The Victoria Colored School opened in 1901. The first principal was F.W. Gross, and his staff consisted of eight teachers. In segregated Victoria, African-Americans attended high school here until 1938. That year was not the beginning of desegregation; that was still a few decades away. But students were able to attend the new black high school.
Victoria Colored School is in Diamond Hill, an area of Victoria settled by freedmen after the Civil War. Slavery had been illegal under Mexican rule. But, in 1836, with the establishment of the Republic of Texas, slavery was legalized. For the first time, cotton farming in the Victoria area was economically feasible. The flat, fertile, well-watered, ‘empty’ ranch lands throughout Texas piqued the interest of cotton growers in the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. They began immigrating here, to Victoria, through the ports of Indianola and Linnville, buying land and bringing hundreds of slaves with them to work the fields.
Twenty-five years after the legalization of slavery, at the outbreak of the Civil War, slaves equaled more than half of Victoria County’s population. The influx of Southerners had surpassed the influx of the strict-abolitionist German immigrants, and Victoria County voted overwhelmingly for the succession of Texas.
Victoria played a crucial role in funding the Confederacy. Confederate ports were blockaded by Federal troops. The Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederacy developed a supply line, the Cotton Road, that funneled cotton overland, through Texas, to Matamoros in Mexico. There, the cotton was exchanged for supplies.
The war eventually destroyed the market for cotton. Thinking they could not survive economically without slave labor, cotton growers dumped their land at fire-sale prices. The freed slaves either became sharecroppers or drifted into the city, establishing a community and social infrastructure.
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